


One (Two)

by kalliel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Koreatown, Nonverbal Communication, POV Child, POV Outsider, Poison, Season/Series 02, laryngeal paralysis, sewer systems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-15
Updated: 2010-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-08 09:16:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4299186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalliel/pseuds/kalliel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A kidnapped girl in the sewers of Koreatown, a poisonous butterfly, and the necessity of nonverbal communication. S2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One (Two)

Two of them. There are two of them. "Did you find the kid? Can you get out?"

"Sammy. Would I bother calling, just to give you peace of mind? I just ate a poisonous, demonic butterfly because--God only knows--you said that was the only way to gank this thing. I'm not exactly jonesing for a second helping he--" Sam hears Dean suck in air between his teeth. The reception's shit, and the sound crackles like fire. Or maybe that's just Dean's voice. _"Whoa."_

"Dean?"

"Does it get worse?" 

Sam hesitates. _You're gonna be okay, right?_ he wants to ask. _I'm almost done here; I'm headed your way. he wants to say._ But Dean exhausts his patience for the dead silence and sucks in more air.

"One thing at a time, then." Breathless grind. Then dial tone.

 

\--

 

When she opens her eyes, all she can see is the shadow of a man, with blood on his face and a knife between his teeth. He's talking with his hands, and she thinks he might be like harabeoji, with ears that don't work anymore, though that's just as well because there's a bad violin sound ringing in her ears and she can't hear anything over that, which sounds almost like _please God deliver me salvation_ only with crying sounds instead of singing ones. And she thinks it might be her voice, but she can't focus enough to really tell, so she bites down harder on her cross and focuses on the feeling of her lips against her fists _please God deliver me salvation salvation salvation_ except that 'salvation' is a hard word she doesn't really know--only that umma told her it was God's. She just wants to be delivered home.

He has her by the shoulders now. Looking at her straight and not saying anything. She turns away. She's never seen anyone like him before; not Korean. Not Ecuadorean or Mexican. She doesn't know what he is. Maybe he's the monster; she doesn't even know, she almost doesn't want to know. She wants to be delivered home.

She wants to run but she doesn't know where to go.

She opens her mouth to ask him _What are you?_ but she can't hear herself over that same bad violin sound in her ears. She clamps her hand over her ears and nothing changes, and it's like the sound is inside her, coming from behind her eyes or maybe from in her nose she doesn't know she can't tell she doesn't know where she is she wants to be delivered home.

The maybe-he-is-a-man is touching her again, tentative and brief like she's a hot pot set to boiling. She jumps away each time, like he is the hot thing. Then he pounds the ground with his fist and tries to yell something mean and snarling, but no sound comes out. She cries. His image bleeds away as her eyes fill with tears, but he goes away, like he's sorry she is crying. 

If there is something she knows, it's that bad things don't go away. 

She holds her breath, tries to stop, even though there are violins crying in her ears and the ground is cold and wet and it's too dark to see anything outside the lean perimeter of the light from the maybe-he-is-a-man's lighter. All her thoughts are spinning and twisting and bending like dancers trying to follow that bad violin song, but she tries to push everything out and just look at maybe-he-is-a-man's lighter.

He has a blue one, like harabeoji has for when he smokes. (She misses harabeoji.) 

She wants to be delivered home.

She tries again to push everything out, and looks at not the lighter this time, but maybe-he-is-a-man.

Maybe-he-is-a-man isn't very much like harabeoji outside of his hands and his lighter, now that she's seen him more and is starting to look at him for real. He is tall and has on a shirt with buttons up the front, even though they're not done up and she can see the dirty white T-shirt he has underneath; it's smeared with black and brown, but mostly red, like fish blood when umma cooks. He has a knife in his hand, which is scary, but the blade is clean, and he rolls his thumb against it the same way she's rolling her tongue against her cross, so maybe it's okay. He looks sick, and tired, and like he wants to be delivered home, too.

She unclasps her cross, even though umma said never to do that, and throws it at him like she's tossing plums into harabeoji's basket, and it drops right into the loose pool of his white shirt, where his body ends and his legs start and the blood is soaking.

He crawls to her. His forearms tremble and because of the devil-face he makes, she doesn't think he likes that very much. When she's enveloped in the perimeter of light same as him, he stops, and with the hand that isn't supporting his body (the same one holding the lighter) he presses his fingers, one two, into her arm. Pauses.

She nods.

He points a finger to his eye.

She nods.

He shines the light in her eyes, draws back her eyelids with his thumbs. She blinks, and he lets go. He points this time to his mouth.

She nods, and opens wide.

He wipes his hands on the bottom of his shirt like it's a habit. When they come away red, dirtier than before, he tries again and smears the red across his his sleeves. His hands don't look much cleaner, but he props her mouth open with the fingers of one and reaches in with the other.

She's thinking about how scary his face looks, wavering light licking at his chin, from the lighter that's in her hands now (when did it get there?) when she gags, and her throat and her chest feel like they're being squashed under a rock; her mouth is full of fingers and they taste like blood and she can feel the tears in her eyes again and she can't breathe she can't breathe until something hot, acid, boils up from her tummy. It leaks all over her chin, and all over his hands, but he doesn't seem to mind; isn't angry, anyway. There's something limp and flat in her mouth, like paper, and he scoops it up and throws it far against the wall.

He shouts something at the wall, even though it comes out choking and silent. Then he spits instead.

There's light like fire, and then blue wings that seem to spout from the wall. They beat, and the little blue lighter in her hands dies, and it is dark. She starts to shake--she doesn't know why but she does; she feels dizzy and the bad violins hurt her ears and her mouth tastes like sickness and she doesn't even have her cross anymore--but the man clamps down a hand on her forearm. Pressure from his fingers--one, two. She still doesn't know what that means, exactly, but she does it back, one and then two. His skin is hot and sticky and wet.

She hears his knife scrape along the floor as he grasps at it in the dark. The thing on the wall, with the firey light and the blue wings like a butterfly's, beats again, then swoops toward them. She closes her eyes and she keeps praying.

She doesn't have her cross, but she has her hands wrapped around her tight, and she presses her own fingers into her forearms, one two one two one two, and feels protected.

She is protected.

 

\--

 

"It's some kind of laryngeal paralytic, mostly; some auditory distortion, muscle weakness. Whatever cocktail of symptoms keeps the prey from running away or crying for help," Sam offers, because he isn't sure what else to say. 

'You look worse than the sewer shit you're sitting in' doesn't seem constructive, 'I don't actually speak any Korean, sue me for taking so long' is something Sam is saving for when Dean's head is clear enough to accept it as an apology, and 'Why is there a little girl swaddled in a T-shirt you bled all over?' isn't a question Sam thinks he actually wants answered. So instead, he continues, "Bobby said that traditionally, a woman was fed small doses of the poison from birth, so that she built up an immunity, but uh, I guess that's not really helpful to you... Anyway, you should be fine. Just don't throw up; the butterfly has to pass all the way through your system to be, um. Purified."

Dean mouths _fuck butterflies_ and gestures _and fuck you, Sam,_ though the ire in both is greatly diminished when Dean's eyelids flutter and he pitches forward and Sam all but slides into home plate to catch him.

Dean is dead-weight heavy against Sam, and fever-hot, but the little girl crawls from his lap, grabs onto Sam's shoulder instead, and appears unhurt, even though there's a dry crust of vomit coating her chin and Dean's bloody fingerprints marking her face like warpaint. All things considered, she is surprisingly okay.

And it's hard to tell from sight alone, but Sam's hands make a pass at Dean's torso, and the wound appears to be clotting nicely, which is always a pleasing consolation. Minus the 'petri dish of infections waiting to happen' and the 'rendered unconscious by demonic butterfly' parts, Dean is surprsingly okay, too. Sam unwraps Dean's fingers from the knife in one hand and from a small cross on a necklace in the other. The latter, he holds out to the girl.

The girl takes it, then points to Dean. "He sleeps like my harabeoji does, when harabeoji comes to chuch with me," she croaks, voice little more than a whisper.

Then she grasps Sam's forearm with both hands, even though they're so small she still only makes it halfway around. Pressure--one, two. 

Sam doesn't really understand, but nevertheless returns the gesture. One, two.

Smile.


End file.
